As a white, heterosexual male, I find that it's not easy oppressing like everybody 24/7. Labour's John Tamihere says enough is enough: the pendulum has swung too far. Russell Brown's response to John Tamihere's recent pro-me comments is interesting reading. And I agree with Russell: I don't feel threatened by society nor attacked from all quarters. I don't think anything has gone too far. I don't have a problem with our female prime ministers and I find it hard to imagine why I would.

This hasn't always be the case. In my early twenties it seemed like nothing I could do was right. Anti-male sentiments were regularly voiced in the flats I lived in, at the university I attended, in my relationships, on TV, everywhere. Overtly sexist remarks were fine if men were the target. I don't know if society has changed or simply my milieu, but that's no longer the case. I think many women develop a political consciousness when they attend universities, while men at this age are also trying to figure out what being a man means in a society where positive male role models are largely non-existent. It is or was a hard time to be male. Partly I think the change is in me: I'm no longer as insecure as I was then: I don't care too much what other people think, unless they are other people I do care about.

Russell Brown:

It's far less common now for New Zealand men to treat their wives as surrogate mothers. The overwhelming majority of men now attend the births of their children. Some of us cook up a storm. This doesn't make us "metrosexual" or "just gay enough", just genuine partners in love and life.

Pet hate: the idea that positive elements of a white, heterosexual, male personality are not white, male or heterosexual. If I can pick colour schemes or dress snappily I must be a little bit gay. Well, the number one reason I dress casually is money. The number two reason is loathing ironing. The number three reason is that if people want to judge me by the way I dress then they are free to do so and I am free to completely exclude them from my life. Perhaps I simply don't prioritise clothing high enough. True: I'd rather spend money on a new camera lens (phallic image or tool? You decide) than a new pair of pants. But hey, my life is a constant battle to keep myself from getting bored out of my skull, and pants are boring. All white, male heterosexuals know that.

Where I work, I write code for web applications. Much of what I do is never actually seen onscreen in the way a graphic design is seen. Inherent in my role is the idea that developers or programmers have no aesthetic sensibilities. This I've found is often very definitely the case, and often not so. Really, I think it's a useful fiction to delineate roles within the business. I don't bother making graphic design criticisms or suggestions as I'm fully aware they'll be ignored. This is painfully ironic to me as so often my work is judged by its visual appearance, something I have no control over.

Two climbers attempt the unclimbed west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. Joe, one of the climbers, breaks his leg badly and dangles, helpless, off an ice cliff. His partner has only one choice: to cut the rope and let him fall. Yet Joe survives on his own and against all likelihood by making bold decisions and setting small goals, to painstakingly make his way off the mountain. The film is a stunning illustration of the tenacity of human life in the face of what seems to be sure death. Once you watch a man crawl down a mountain with a broken leg, anything seems possible.

Recently I've been working on an experimental knowledge base self-help interface that understands English questions and provides chatty answers. It doesn't really understand what you ask: it just identifies a few keywords and ignores the rest, but the effect is fairly convincing if you don't try to fool it. It relies on the human tendency to ascribe intelligence to objects that really don't merit it. We even do it with pets, treating them as if they are more intelligent than they really are. Sometimes that backfires as they begin to learn words like B-A-T-H and V-E-T. This concept of ascribing intelligence is very important to anybody involved in computer/human interfaces, and you can read more about it in The Media Equation.

So I was thinking about how recently I've been building these mockeries of humanity, and it struck me as ironic as my work is so painfully lonely. There is often loud laughter in our office space, but it's not we developers. Sure we chat about last night's movie or this interface design or that bug. But it's somehow different from meeting clients and learning about them and their business. That's when the laughter occurs, which I think is a bonding technique: we're all on the same team, there's no danger here. In contrast, the talk in the developer space is sterile; there's no skill involved; they know all my jokes. I know what they think about pretty much everything we're ever going to discuss at the office. It was interesting to go tramping with somebody from the office a few weeks back, as suddenly there were a lot of new things we could talk about. I chattered non-stop much of the time, like a damburst washing away small villages.

Of course I realise I'm probably over-rating what I haven't got, but I think the lack of human contact is the hardest part of my job, and it gets harder as the years go by.

New Zealand, the land where nothing happens so we harrass our politicians over the speed of their motorcades, is currently being rocked by a leaded cornflour contamination crisis. That's right: our household has been custard-free for two days. Now the interesting thing to me is that the cheaper "Pam's" brand is affected along with the premium Edmonds brand, "Fielder's". Translation? It's the same stuff, so if you buy Fielder's, you're a sucker. 

Suddenly yesterday (for such is the way these things happen) I had a need to be able to parse boolean search expressions. Not write them: parse them. I'm talking about things like this: "Boolean expressions AND fun OR exciting AND NOT boring". They can be a little complex as you need to evaluate them in the right order, and parentheses may be added to the expression to control evaluation order.

I started thinking about nodes and trees and time started stretching before me like a tunnel. I hunted around for algorithms but they must keep them all on some secret page somewhere: I didn't have much luck. I did find other posts from people wanting to parse boolean expressions though.

But hey, then I thought: most languages have a built-in ability to parse these expressions. Just let the language parse it! So in this case the expression is being used to search some text for the various phrases in the expression. All I needed was some regular expression fanciness to replace each phrase or word with a find function, then evaluate the whole thing. It works and it took 10 minutes, after well over half an hour hunting around for techniques to parse boolean expressions.

Sometimes, you have to slow down and think about the lazy way.

Russell Brown points out this interview with Sacha Baron Cohen, creator of Ali G, over at the Guardian. Cohen talks about how his naïve character gets people to say what they really think, and how even statesmen change their personalities to suit the occasion.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali kept on telling me he used to be a bit of a bully in school, and he used to muck around. They want Ali G's approval. They're in the room with a total idiot, and yet they're seeking his approval. As if it somehow makes them cooler.

Last week I finally watched a DVD of Ali G interviews in one sitting, much to the horror of my workmates ("You're supposed to watch them one at a time!"). It's rather funny, but then I watched The Office last night and remembered how staggeringly good UK comedy can be. Of course Ali G isn't all about comedy, but then nor is The Office. Let's be honest: for office workers, The Office is a form of therapy. The website is good too. Check it.

It's a good time of year to natter about TV....

So how about that new series, William and Mary? The first episode screened here last week and introduced a comedy drama about a midwife and an undertaker. Unusually, this is a comedy about adults. Most characters on TV seem to me to be rather emotionally retarded: it makes the comedy funnier (Everybody Loves Raymond), and the tragedy (Othello) more so. Both characters here have full, rich, busy lives, and they don't seem to need romance to define themselves, and make themselves complete.

I remember watching the start of Cold Feet, thinking it looked promising. But the writers of that series were ruthless with their characters, sticking them together then ripping them apart again every episode. It got so you could predict everything that would go wrong. I think they abused their relationship of trust with the viewers, so I stopped watching it. Finally, they killed off one of the main characters, just because the series was ending, because they could. I'm glad I didn't see that.

OK perhaps it's my nervous disposition, or my natural wariness of power structures, but I'm a little unsettled when the New Zealand Defence Force sends documents to the US Defence Logistics Agency called "Matthew Part 2.doc". (Yes, I detect the faint mocking tone: are they toying with me?) The file is labelled "Unclassified" so I'm allowed to tell you this, and on reflection I probably didn't need to shred and eat the copy I printed out. Cellulose goes straight to my waistline. It's all very strange and Kafkaesque. All this international chatter for a sale worth a handful of greenbacks.

In other news, I've been dealing with the Department of Internal Affairs here too. Turns out they handle translation work. Who knew? That's three New Zealand government departments in one week (IRD being the third), and two US.

After Phyllis, I found Hank the Coca-Cola vRep. You can ask him if he likes Pepsi. He's a bit square and won't tell me what his favourite Coke is, and he is coy in response to "Do you think Vanilla Coke is yucky?". He seems to be confused by the question, "Why is the coke bottle shaped like a lady?" but he's on solid turf with, "How much cocaine does Coke contain?" and he even understands the questions, "Do you like the movie, 'The Coca Cola Kid'?" and "Do you think Phyllis is a hottie?" On the whole he's a bit of a thicko, can't even tell me what cola is. Phyllis was smarter, and better looking.

I love this idea though. I wonder how hard it would be....

It all started with a request from an American government employee to puschase some of my software. To sell the the US government, you must be registered in their Central Contractor Registration (CCR) system. You fill in a form with your address details, business income, and so forth.

But to get started with this, you need a Dun and Bradstreeet D-U-N-S number. Another simple form: enter your business name, physical address and so forth. The response was fast although peppered with typos. It seems like they must have re-keyed my data. This is, by the way, yet another way you can now look up my home address.

I had to wait overnight for the number to enter the US database, and commence filling in the CCR form. Almost done, but all foreign companies I find must also have an NCAGE number, that's a NATO Commercial and Government Entity Code. Sounds vaguely menacing, especially as all these forms are housed at the Department of Defense ("Questions? Ask Phyllis our virtual rep!"). Actually, I rather like the idea of Phyllis the virtual rep. But I'm getting distracted....

To fill in this form you need to tell something about what you do (I checked the "Manufacturer" box — no really, the options were "vendor,manufacturer,service provider, and government" or something like that)  and supply a SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) code. I may have gone wrong at this point as I supplied a New Zealand code. I think the form is processed in New Zealand so I may have gone right. I don't know. It'll keep them quiet, I'm sure. I just may end up listed as a jam  tart manufacturer. I put down 243008 (computer software mfg).

Even to find the New Zealand business description codes is not easy. I resorted to reading my tax return (not a happy place) and finding the address there.

Well, it's great to see that bureaucracy doesn't need paper to do it's thing, just forms, forms, forms. And you know the ultimate irony? The software I'm selling is designed to help you build better online forms.

This film established Kieslowski's reputation. Semi-autobiographical in nature, it explores artistic freedom, censorship, the sacrifice of the artist, and the moral consequences of documentary film-making in an oppressive state.

Filip buys an 8mm film camera to record his new-born baby's first days, and soon becomes an enthusiatic amateur, recording everything around him. As he becomes a serious film-maker, discovering a cause that is greater than himself, his life outside film collapses: he loses his wife, his child, and his job. This is not, however, the story of a man destroyed, but of a man transformed. He realises that his documentaries change people's lives in unpredictable ways, helping people and hurting others. Ultimately, he turns the camera upon himself to document his transformation. This is the only story he is morally able to tell.

There are parallels here to Kieslowski himself. Much of his early work was documentary film-making, which he apparently abandoned feeling that the consequences for his protagonists were too great. Instead, he developed the stories of fictional characters.

My father called up today. Not to say anything in particular. If sometimes he has a lot on his mind, this was not one of those times.

We haven't seen you much lately, he said. I was around at the weekend, I said. We ate dinner on Thursday. He said, oh? Did we?

I entertained him with a story about the office hijinks (Matthew arrives at work, Matthew sits, Matthew works, Matthew stands, Matthew leaves).

I think maybe Mum had left him alone for the evening so he was making prank calls.

Macromedia guy Christian Cantrell talks about networking his voice recorder and his iMac via audio using the tried and tested "English spoken language" protocol. Gets you thinking huh?